Age, as it does to every life eventually, gradually changed the terrain Sajjad Husain was fighting on. The political organizer became, by degrees no one could mark precisely, an elder. The businessman's pace slowed. Illness began to intrude in ways it had not during the decades when his body had simply absorbed whatever his ambitions asked of it — a period of severe eye pain in his later years is remembered specifically, one among several physical difficulties that reminded a man who had rarely paused for anything that his body, too, eventually required his attention.
What is striking about this period, reading the family's account of it, is how much of what looks like a late-life turn toward spirituality was, in fact, simply the surfacing of something that had been present in him from the very beginning, now given room to breathe once the demands of business and politics had eased. He had always observed the daily prayers. He had always disliked ostentatious religious display, insisting that faith be reflected in conduct rather than performance. He had maintained relations with respected scholars throughout his life, among them associations connected to figures such as Maulana Ashraf Ali Thanvi, and he had always believed, with a consistency that never wavered across sixty years of dramatically changing circumstances, that religious instruction meant nothing if it did not translate into honesty, justice, and service toward other people.
In these later years, that underlying conviction simply moved closer to the surface. Devotional poetry, contemplation, extended religious companionship, and a deepening attachment to prayer occupied more of his attention, not because a new man had replaced the old one, but because the old man, freed at last from the daily urgency of contracts and committee meetings and newspaper deadlines, finally had the quiet in which to dwell more fully in a faith that had underwritten every public act of his life without most observers ever fully recognizing it. Masjid-building, prisoner-feeding, earthquake relief, political contribution, hospitality, educational philanthropy, the stubborn refusal to over-claim after Partition — all of it, seen from this vantage in his final years, resolved into a single, continuous understanding he had carried since boyhood: that faith which left no evidence in the lives of other people was not, in any sense that mattered to him, faith at all.